Tuesday, December 15, 2015

They're Getting Awfully Good at This. Practice Makes Perfect.

Philippine authorities have evacuated six provinces in preparation for Typhoon Melor. Some 750,000 people were relocated to safety. This sort of thing is now becoming almost routine in the Philippines as it is regularly battered by megastorms.

Just to be prissy about this story and all the stories like it. The report speaks of Philippino authorities evacuating 750,000 people. Here's the thing. When I began at CBC (back then we shot news on film) I made this mistake until our wise old copy editor informed me that you can evacuate a town or you can evacuate a building but the only way you can evacuate a person involves an enema.

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Oh balderdash, in a world where "begging a question" means suggesting that said question be raised, where "decimate" means to almost entirely destroy, where the use of "-ly" on adverbs is as a rare as coelocanth poop, and where "fulsome" means "in depth and complete", moving yet another verb to have both direct and transitive meanings is hardly an enormity. ("Enormity" being another word that everybody in the Canadian media other than Andrew Coyne should approach with caution.)